Is Marketing The Wind Beneath Your Wings?

I’m reading a fantastic book right now called Skyfaring. In the book, pilot Mark Vanhoenacker shares what it’s like to be a commercial pilot who spends the majority of his life in the air. The book is written beautifully and well worth a read.

One question has always fascinated me when it comes to the mystery of flight.

How does a massive 340-tonne airplane get off the ground and maintain flight at 40,000 feet?

It’s hard to fathom, really.

Even Vanhoenacker finds himself astonished and amazed as the machine takes flight.

He explains:

“The 747 is too heavy to stand on the tarmac of many of the world’s airports. If we look closely, we will see that as the plane accelerates, the wing begins to rise. It works its magic first upon itself. Long before you are airborne the wings are claiming weight – their weight, your weight – from the wheels and the earth beneath them.”

In business, your wings are your marketing. Marketing is what drives your entire business and many companies still greatly misunderstand this all too important point.

But it works its magic first upon yourself. Long before your business got off the ground, your marketing was claiming weight from the earth beneath you.

Everything we do to attract, compel, intrigue and have others receptive to our business, our products, and our services, is marketing.

Everything your sales team is using to present, deliver, and secure customers, is marketing.

Everything that happens after the sale, and ensures the customer remains a customer beyond the initial transaction, is marketing.

The products or services that you offer act as the engine that provides thrust. But it’s the wings (your marketing) that allow a great business to soar.

Why is it most businesses still miss this?

I think it’s because marketing often seems like an invisible process, and it can be easy to miss the importance of it. It’s often viewed as the least urgent thing on many of our overfull desks.

What many companies fail understand is that ongoing, effective, and powerful marketing is the lifeblood of a thriving organization and can help you create an almost unfair advantage against your competition.

Marketing is simple, and it starts with asking a few simple questions:

How do we attract the most probable prospects who are likely to do business with us?

How do we maximize the sale?

How do we continuously market those customers to have them continue doing business with us?

How do we market in a way that makes our customers want to tell other potential customers?

This is what I help my clients do and where we see the most dramatic success.

Vanhoenacker says it’s the wings that “soar and pull us up.”

Are you stuck on the tarmac just revving your engines, when you could be being pulled up?